UPDATE: Stupidly I had forgotten this vital confirmation from Channel 4 News (serial rebel Alex Thomson) of the D Notice in place on mention of Pablo Miller.

Back then I did not realise what I now know, that the person being protected was Pablo Miller, colleague in both MI6 then Orbis Intelligence of Christopher Steele, author of the fabrications of the Trump/Russia golden shower dossier. That the government’s very first act on the poisoning was to ban all media mention of Pablo Miller makes it extremely probable that this whole incident is related to the Trump dossier and that Skripal had worked on it, as I immediately suspected. The most probable cause is that Skripal – who you should remember had traded the names of Russian agents to Britain for cash – had worked on the dossier with Miller but was threatening to expose its lies for cash.

ORIGINAL POST: This comment from Clive Ponting, doyen of British whistleblowers, appeared on my website and he has now given me permission to republish it under his full name:

I have been reading the blogs for some time but this is my first post. Like Craig I was a senior civil servant but in the ministry of defence not the fco. I had plenty of dealings with all three intelligence agencies. It seems to me that the reason none of the MSM are doing any investigating/reporting of the Salisbury affair, apart from official handouts, is that the government have slapped a D-Notice over the whole incident and it is not possible to report that a notice has been issued.
Here is another theory as to what happened. The Russians pardoned Skripal and allowed him to leave (spy agencies have an understanding that agents will always be swapped after an interval – it’s the only protection they have and helps recruitment). In the UK Skripal would have been thoroughly debriefed by MI6 and MI5 (his ex-handler lives near Salisbury). If at some point they discovered that Skripal was giving them false information, perhaps he was told to do so by the FSB as a condition of his release, lives may have been endangered/lost. If he also was also involved in the ‘golden showers’ dossier then elements in the US would have a reason to act as well. The whole incident was an inside job not to kill him, hence the use of BZ, but to give him a warning and a punishment. The whole thing is being treated as though the authorities know exactly what went on but have to cover it up.

Addendum

I meant to add that the policeman who ‘just happened’ to be around was almost certainly the special branch ‘minder’ who was keeping Yulia under surveillance. The media are not allowed to mention the existence of a D notice.

Those of us who have been in the belly of the beast and have worked closely with the intelligence services, really do know what they and the British government are capable of. They are not “white knights”.

I would add it has been very plain from day one that there is a D notice on Pablo Miller.

At the disposal of the Center for Investigation Management were telephone contacts between chemist Leonid Rink and his daughter Olga, seized during searches. Rink became famous as the creator of the substance “Rookie”, who in 1995 killed the banker Kivelidi, and in 2018, may have tried to poison the father and daughter of the Violins. The attention of the correspondent of the LRC Sergey Kanev was attracted by the Russian-Syrian businessman Mudalal Khouri, whose activities became known after he, along with his partner, FIDE president Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, came under US sanctions for assisting the regime of Bashar Assad. In Rink’s contacts there are as many as three of his phone numbers.

– Rink sold poisonous substances to criminal authorities and Chechens, and he had a phone and a notebook removed. Fsbeshniki downloaded us the chemist’s contacts and asked us to check his connections for possible buyers on our databases. If my memory serves me, there were more than two hundred telephones of heads of defense enterprises, closed institutes, all sorts of laboratory assistants, military men, and even the phone of a Finnish bank (in fact, Rink’s 177 contacts – LRC ). In the records were the numbers of the Syrian Khuri and his brother Imad. We reported that this client is at us in a special session and revolves around scientists in the field of defense research. The Lubyanka comrades said that they would take care of it, but I do not know how it ended up.

After this conversation with the former operative of the 12th department of the Department of Internal Affairs of the Moscow Central Internal Affairs Directorate, who participated in the investigation of criminal cases involving a chemist, I myself wondered what had all ended.

The US Finance Ministry included Ilyumzhinov in the sanctions lists in 2015 – for the support of the regime of Bashar Assad. Along with the chess player, the bank “The Russian Financial Alliance” got under the sanctions, in which Ilyumzhinov had a share of 19.03%, and his business partner was co-owner and chairman of the bank’s board of directors Mudalal Khouri. December 8, 2016 Kommersant wrote that Mudalal Khoury appealed to the FSB, the Interior Ministry and the president’s anti-corruption department with statements that the former leadership had stolen 700 million rubles. The day after the publication of the Central Bank of Russia, he withdrew a license from the bank.

Khouri represents Assad’s regime in Russia, follows from the official position of the US Treasury, and at least since 1994 is connected with financial postings in the interests of the Syrian government. Still, according to the Ministry of Finance of the United States, Khouri was an intermediary in trying to smuggle ammonia into the country in 2013.

According to Vedomosti, in 1983 Khury graduated from the University of Friendship of Peoples as a civil engineer. According to the LRC, he studied well, was the party organizer of the Communist cell of students from Arab countries. In 1988 he became a candidate of technical sciences. In the 90s he obtained Russian citizenship and worked as deputy head of the Russian representative office of the Cyprus company Hudsotrade Limited, affiliated with his family.

Mudalal Khoury and his wife like to visit London | Photos: Facebook
The unofficial biography of Syrians is much more interesting: as the LRC found out, graduate student Mudalal Khuri got into criminal specialties of the Ministry of Internal Affairs in 1987 – he illegally acquired mercury from the native of Kharkov, Vladimir Petrov. The criminal case promised to be promising – several directors of chemical plants could lose their seats, but unexpectedly a year later in connection with the sincere repentance of the defendants, the Frunzensky court of Moscow released them from custody. Avoid criminal liability Khuri helped KGB officers, supervising the university. Since then, the Syrians have passed through any troubles, including problems with a fake Polish passport.

Former employee of the KGB-FSB Nikolai Kozlov said that to buy mercury Khuri could provoke colleagues from another department to recruit.

– Our usual recruitment approaches. I heard about Khuri from the guys from the other department. He had some troubles in his homeland, and he began his business in Moscow with the sale of curtains from Damascus. I remember that he threw someone at a large sum and was looking for protection from us. Then, on the recommendation from the office, he rented several rooms in the hotel “Sputnik” on Leninsky, and then you already know: women, boys, foreigners and cinema.

Now Khuri is a co-founder of “Ram” LLC – a manufacturer of a drug for diarrhea in domestic animals “Polisorbin”.

He is also a member of the board of the founding in 2014 of the charitable foundation “RUSSAR” (Rus and the Syrian Arab Republic). The head of the fund is former 77-year-old Oleg Fomin, a good friend of the Assad family and the late leaders of Libya Muammar Gaddafi and Iraq Saddam Hussein. Among his acquaintances was Sergei Skripal – they worked together in the personnel department of the Foreign Ministry. In the section “Participants of the Fund” on the website among businessmen from the Middle East one can find a pleiad of prominent Russian figures: presidential candidate Sergei Baburin, former chief of the Main Directorate for International Military Cooperation of the General Staff of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, Nelli Kuskova from the Combat Brotherhood “, Hieromonk Stefan and others.

Mudalal’s younger brother Khouri Imad has been doing business in Russia since 1994 . In particular, he is an investor in several development projects – for example, his LLC IC “Nikolskoe” invested in the reconstruction of the estate of the XVIII century in the Kaluga region, which is now put up for sale for 1.3 billion rubles. In 2013 Imad Khouri was mentioned in connection with the murder of the founder of the construction company “Bamo” Hovik Muradyan, the brother of the Armenian Ambassador to Iraq. He was stabbed in the center of Moscow. The customer and the killer were not found. Shortly before the murder, Imadi Khuri became the owner of the construction company of the Muradyan brothers and tried to stop her bankruptcy.

The Khury brothers were also co-owners of Tempbank, which was subject to US sanctions in 2014 – for multi-million dollar transactions between Syria and Russia.

Hi, thank you again for a very interesting posts. To continue the discussion about Dr. Rink. I think that the material of the forensic expertise in the Kivelidi case leaked to the West, and that this information was sufficient for reproducing the A-234 by the Western scientists (Dr. Rohrbaugh who published that was a forensic expert and for sure he was not aware that what he published was a chemical weapon):

An excellent article. Another factor must be that it is reported that Sergei wrote to Putin in recent times asking for permission to return to visit his very ill elderly mother. UK papers suggested he hadn’t got a reply. Maybe his daughter with her own security contacts was bringing a message? It was clearly a legitimate request to see his Mother before she died but if he had gone he would no doubt have been interrogated – or he might have offered information in return for being allowed to stay in Russia in his last years. If he did have information about Steele there would have been an urgent need to do something to stop him. A double spy is always likely to end up a triple agent, especially if it means a return to a beloved homeland and family including a mother too sick to travel. The idea a Russian hit squad would chose to use an ineffective agent already linked to Russia is absurd. If it was an inter-oligarch argument about money then he would have been run over, strangled or shot. But this squad must have gone to a lot of trouble to use a nerve agent that was tantamount to leaving a calling card. No wonder further discussion is banned; the story is so bad it will never stand up.